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April 2018

BOOKS, EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anti-Israel Hate on American Campuses A new book shines a disturbing light on the university, the suppression of free speech, and the poison of the BDS movement. Noah Beck

By on April 3rd, 2018

About six months after Andrew Pessin posted on his Facebook profile a defense of Israel during its 2014 war against Hamas, the once popular Connecticut College philosophy professor was subjected to an academic smear campaign. The school paper published articles defaming him. The administration hosted condemnations of Pessin from across the campus community on the school’s website, and tolerated other anti-Semitic activities that only worsened the climate for Jews and Israel supporters. Pessin received death threats and, in the spring of 2015, took a medical leave of absence. The Connecticut College administration offered no meaningful protection or support to Pessin, and never issued any apology for its role in his abuse.

The Pessin affair was part of a growing trend of anti-Israel hostility on U.S. campuses, but at least his story has a somewhat happy ending. Pessin resumed teaching last fall after an extended paid sabbatical, and – together with a colleague – convinced the school to establish a Jewish Studies program. Moreover, he has edited a new book with Fordham University’s Doron Ben-Atar on the general campus trend: Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS. Ben-Atar, who is part of Fordham’s American Studies program, protested at a faculty meeting about the 2013 passing of a resolution calling for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel, only to find himself soon being investigated for unspecified charges, resulting in a Kafkaesque campaign of intimidation and vilification. This volume of essays, by faculty and students who have confronted anti-Israelism on their campuses, documents and analyzes how this movement masks an underlying anti-Semitism that creates a hostile environment for Jews while undermining free speech and civility.

Writer Noah Beck interviewed Pessin via email.

Q: Your book catalogues the many underhanded tactics used to promote the anti-Israel agenda on college campuses, which should help Israel advocates prepare for what awaits them. Did your personal ordeal inspire you to create a potential resource for campus Israel advocates? Or did you have the idea for such a book even before what happened to you?

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DACA Declared Dead As Border Anarchy Intensifies Mysterious group deploys “caravan” of illegal aliens headed for US border. Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 3rd, 2018

A caravan of more than 1,000 young Central Americans is marching through Mexico heading for the United States. This caravan is the project of Pueblo Sin Fronteras but establishment news reports provide little information on the group, whose website reveals no founder, staff, board of directors or funders.

“We are a collective of friends who decided to be in permanent solidarity with displaced peoples,” the site explains. None of the “friends” is named but “our dream is to build solidarity among peoples and turn down border walls imposed by greed.”

According to CNN, Alex Mensing is one of the “US collaborators who works for Pueblo Sin Fronteras,” but CNN did not explain that Mensing is a paralegal at the University of San Francisco’s Immigration and Deportation Defense Law Clinic. He did tell CNN that the caravaners’ goal is to seek asylum in the United States.

This has come to the attention of President Trump, who on Sunday tweeted: “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL.”

The president took heat from Mexican secretary of foreign affairs Luis Videgaray Caso, who told CNN, “Every day Mexico and the US work together on migration throughout the region,” and “upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law. Happy Easter.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Swedish crime prevention agency refuses to gather information on immigrant background of criminals By Thomas Lifson

By on April 3rd, 2018

It is a fairly open secret that the immigrant refugees whom Sweden has admitted in large numbers in recent years have unleashed a crime wave, particularly violent rape. Some Swedish media have been willing to broach the topic quite recently.

Via Breitbart:

Researchers at Swedish tabloid Expressen found that 32 of the 43 men sentenced for gang rape are immigrants, with eight born in Sweden to parents who were both born abroad.

A further two of the offenders were born in Sweden to one immigrant and one Sweden-born parent with just one born in Sweden to parents who were both born in Sweden.

Finding that perpetrators were on average 21 years old when they committed the gang rape, with 13 of the offenders aged under 18, the investigation also revealed that 14 of the 43 men – or roughly a third – had been convicted of previous crimes in Sweden.

But the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, known as Brå, is refusing to collect information on the origins of criminals.

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) has said that it will not gather ethnic or migrant background data on criminal suspects, claiming the data would not help its mission.

The statement came after an inquiry from Moderate Party politician Tomas Tobé who, like many others, has argued that the statistics agency should gather as much data as possible in order to paint a clearer picture of crime in the country, Helsingborgs Dagblad reports.

“It a betrayal to the victims to actively rule out also looking at the foreign background of the perpetrators. It is obvious that Brå does not dare to do this because they lack government support,” Tobé said.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arab Leaders Abandon the Palestinians Facing threats from Iran and Turkey, they want peace—and to strangle Hamas. Walter Russell Mead

By on April 3rd, 2018

On the surface it was business as usual in the Gaza Strip. Hamas bussed thousands of residents to the border with Israel to begin a six-week protest campaign ahead of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence—or, as the Palestinians call it, the nakba, or “catastrophe.” This protest would mark “the beginning of the Palestinians’ return to all of Palestine,” according to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

It didn’t. Stones were thrown, tires were set aflame, and shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, the borders were still in place and 15 Palestinians lay dead, with three more succumbing later from injuries. While families endured their private tragedies, familiar controversies swirled. The usual people denounced Israel in the usual ways, countered by the usual defenders making the usual arguments.

But what is happening in Gaza today is not business as usual. Tectonic plates are shifting in the Middle East as the Sunni Arab world counts the cost of the failed Arab Spring and the defeat of Sunni Arabs by Iranian-backed forces in Syria.

In headier times, pan-Arab nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and lesser figures like Saddam Hussein dreamed of creating a united pan-Arab state that could hold its own among the world’s great powers. When nationalism sputtered out, many Arabs turned to Sunni Islamist movements instead. Those, too, have for the time being failed, and today Arab states seek protection from Israel and the U.S. against an ascendant Iran and a restless, neo-Ottoman Turkey.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Trump Presidency is bigger than the man Irwin Stelzer

By on April 2nd, 2018

No one was more surprised at Trump’s electoral victory than the man himself, unless it was supporters of Hillary Clinton, a candidate who never did explain just why she wanted to be president and who continually badgered her team to come up with a theme for the pudding that was her campaign. How was it possible that this vulgar misogynist could beat Hillary Clinton, she the shatterer of glass ceilings; the defender of abortion on demand, financed if necessary by orders of Catholic nuns; and of young persons’ rights to choose their gender and their toilets regardless of gender; of the right of illegal immigrants to become American citizens. She was consort to beneficiaries of globalisation who filled her coffers with speaking fees, and representative of all that “deplorables”, as she called Trump supporters, find so offensive about the social agenda of the bicoastal liberal establishment. The Russians must have done it. Or the really dumb Founding Fathers who established an electoral system that gave voice to less densely populated states rather than rely entirely on the popular vote. No matter the cause, Trump is an illegitimate president.

Which means that the Democratic minority, with the support of an overwhelmingly liberal-establishment media, is not merely obligated to oppose those of his policies they deem not to be in the national interest, but to have him removed from office, preferably in handcuffs. The virulence of the attacks on the President makes the battle between Momentum and the Blairites seem tame by comparison. Trump’s response is to lash out indiscriminately at anyone who disagrees with whatever his whim-of-the-moment seems to be. His weapon of choice is the tweet, which a frustrated media must report, giving these short bursts of often incoherent, often nasty impulses an even wider audience. Trump supporters liken the tweets to FDR’s use of radio — the famous Fireside Chats — to go over the heads of a hostile press directly to the American people, but a better comparison would be to the “nya, nya, you’re one, too” response of a witless schoolboy to some disagreeable remark by a playmate.

So much for Trump the person, and why his natural propensity to lie — not so much to lie, but to invent an alternative “truth” in which he really, really believes — and to substitute invective for reason, is justified by his supporters. To that 35 to 40 per cent of the electorate, largely white, rural, poor or middle class, religious and male, Trump might be a sinful New York property developer claiming to be a billionaire, but, oddly, he is “one of us”, to borrow a descriptive once popular in Britain, eager to poke a finger in the eye of the elites who remain unaware of our existence and problems.

On to policy. It is important to distinguish Trump the Person from Trump the Policymaker. Trump the person believes that the current international trading system is rigged in favour of the rich, of what David Goodhart calls “the anywheres”, who couldn’t care less about Making America Great Again. This is the New York crowd that kept a thrusting Trump at arm’s length, and only now have found reason to invite him into their more tasteful, less gilt-covered apartments for dinner. Trump the campaigner promised to smash that system in favour of one that protects American interests.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Report: House Democrats Exempted Pakistani IT Aides from Background Checks By Mairead McArdle

By on April 2nd, 2018

Not one of 44 House Democrats bothered with background checks for members of a close-knit group of Pakistani IT aides who ended up gaining “unauthorized access” to congressional data, a new report from The Daily Caller shows.

House security rules require members to start a background check for employees, but they can also put down that another member has vouched for the person.

The background check was waived for all five IT workers, who made headlines last year for what the House inspector general’s report described as activity with “nefarious purposes.”

Pakistan-born Imran Awan, who served as a tech aide in Congress for 13 years, managed to snag congressional IT jobs with salaries as high as $165,000 for his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina Alvi, and his friend Rao Abbas, who had just been fired from McDonald’s. Together the group was found logging into accounts of representatives who had not hired them, using representatives’ private usernames, and uploading data off of the House network, according to the inspector general’s report.

Abid was working for Representative Yvette Clarke (D., N.Y.) when $120,000 of computer equipment disappeared. Then-congressman Xavier Becerra, who hired Imran, had his server stolen after the inspector general listed it as evidence in an investigation.

Some of the inspector general’s investigators who reviewed the aides’ network activity mused that they may have been ignoring House security protocol simply to share job duties, but others felt it was something more sinister.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Trump EPA to Roll Back Obama-Era Auto-Emissions Standards By Jack Crowe

By on April 2nd, 2018

The EPA announced Monday that it will begin to roll back Obama-era vehicle-emission standards due to concerns the regulations were overzealous and the product of “politically charged expediency.”

The emissions standards, which would have applied to cars and light trucks produced between 2022 and 2025, were a core component of the Obama administration’s commitment under the Paris Climate Accords to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. The announcement represents the conclusion of the Trump administration’s review of the regulations and the beginning of a months-long rule-rewriting process.“Obama’s EPA cut the midterm evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality and set the standards too high,” EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wrote in a statement.

Pruitt also announced the agency will “reexamine” a waiver granted by the Obama administration, which allows California to set its own, more stringent vehicle-emissions standards. The move will likely prompt yet another legal battle between the Trump administration and California, which has established itself as a bastion of judicial resistance to federal immigration and environmental policy under the administration.

While Democrats viewed the Obama EPA regulations as a necessarily aggressive response to climate change, the agency has been criticized by industry stakeholders and Republican lawmakers for setting unrealistic goals. Automakers missed 2016 tailpipe-emission targets by 9 grams per mile and Obama EPA officials conceded that they would likely come up short of the 54.5 mile per gallon fuel-efficiency target for autos produced in 2025, as well.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Chappaquiddick’ Plays 1969’s Ted Kennedy Scandal Straight Ted Kennedy remains the prime example of a politician who retained forgive-anything followers after committing what should have been considered a capital crime.By James Dawson see note please

By on April 2nd, 2018

Long before and after Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy was a drunk, a reprobate and a liar. The “lion” of the Senate was a drunk and a sexual harasser of women. He had been expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test which a surrogate took for him. His military “service” was engineered by his father. In June 1951, he signed up for a four year term which was immediately shortened to a two year term by his father’s cronies. His father’s political connections ensured that he was not deployed to the ongoing Korean War and he was discharged after 21 months. In spite of his sordid history he is buried in Arlington Cemetery….rsk
Donald Trump famously bragged during the last presidential campaign that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing voters. Unless the president actually picks up a pistol to prove that point before 2020, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy will remain the prime example of a modern politician who retained the support of fanatical forgive-anything followers after committing what should have been considered a capital crime.

In July 1969, Kennedy drove off a bridge, left 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his submerged car, then failed to inform police about the event until 10 hours later. Director John Curran’s “Chappaquiddick” focuses on that tragic night and the immediate aftermath of the scandal that should have killed Kennedy’s political career, but instead became an almost black-humor indictment of American politics and certain voters’ gullibility.

What’s refreshing (if not downright amazing) about Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan’s screenplay, based largely on facts from a lengthy 1970 court inquest, is that it fairly recounts the reprehensible episode without any liberal-Hollywood sugarcoating or raging right-wing hysteria. Although there certainly is little to like about the movie’s Kennedy, who is well portrayed by actor Jason Clarke as a self-serving, deceitful embarrassment, the writers evenhandedly refrain from resorting to any needlessly trashy sensationalism.

While scenes such as backroom damage-control strategy sessions at the Kennedy compound are credibly imagined, for example, the writers resist dramatizing any implied adulterous relationship between Kennedy and Kopechne. With so much documented depravity already on the record, there’s no need to go overboard making up any new misdeeds.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Planned Princesshood Feminist groups want to turn fairy-tale heroines into propaganda tools. Faith Moore

By on April 2nd, 2018

‘We need a Disney princess who’s had an abortion,” tweeted a Pennsylvania branch of Planned Parenthood last week. Though the tweet was deleted, Planned Parenthood Keystone chief Melissa Reed stands by it. “Planned Parenthood believes that pop culture . . . has a critical role to play in educating the public and sparking meaningful conversations around sexual and reproductive health issues and policies, including abortion,” she said in a statement to Fox News.

Feminist critics have been waging war on Disney princesses since the 1990s, and they’re gaining ground. Peggy Orenstein’s 2011 best seller, “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” called the fairy-tale heroine a symbol of “the patriarchal oppression of all women.”

Disney has been listening. In 2016 the company launched the Dream Big, Princess campaign, which recasts Ariel as a speed-swimming champion, Rapunzel as a gymnast and Cinderella as a dance prodigy. In an obvious nod to the feminist notion that traditional princesses are “damsels in distress,” Disney has edited out the princesses’ signature inner virtues of integrity, courage, optimism and heart, and replaced them with feminist-approved—but ultimately shallow—physical achievement. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Alarmists May Inherit the Wind They likened a courtroom ‘tutorial’ to the Scopes Monkey Trial. But their side got schooled. By Phelim McAleer

By on April 2nd, 2018

Five American oil companies find themselves in a San Francisco courtroom. California v. Chevron is a civil action brought by the city attorneys of San Francisco and Oakland, who accuse the defendants of creating a “public nuisance” by contributing to climate change and of conspiring to cover it up so they could continue to profit.

No trial date has been set, but on March 21 the litigants gathered for a “climate change tutorial” ordered by Judge William Alsup —a prospect that thrilled climate-change alarmists. Excited spectators gathered outside the courtroom at 6 a.m., urged on by advocates such as the website Grist, which declared “Buckle up, polluters! You’re in for it now,” and likened the proceeding to the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

In the event, the hearing did not go well for the plaintiffs—and not for lack of legal talent. Steve W. Berman, who represented the cities, is a star trial lawyer who has made a career and a fortune suing corporations for large settlements, including the $200 billion-plus tobacco settlement in 1998.

“Until now, fossil fuel companies have been able to talk about climate science in political and media arenas where there is far less accountability to the truth,” Michael Burger of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University told Grist. The hearing did mark a shift toward accountability—but perhaps not in the way activists would have liked.

Judge Alsup started quietly. He flattered the plaintiffs’ first witness, Oxford physicist Myles Allen, by calling him a “genius,” but he also reprimanded Mr. Allen for using a misleading illustration to represent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a graph ostensibly about temperature rise that did not actually show rising temperatures. CONTINUE AT SITE

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